


Death at My Heels

by lacedramblings, yelenavasilyevna



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Mob, Excessive smoking, F/M, M/M, New York City, Russian Mafia, idc its just an all around good time, might end up being a little gay who knows its the twenties
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-05-21
Packaged: 2020-03-09 08:45:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18913513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacedramblings/pseuds/lacedramblings, https://archiveofourown.org/users/yelenavasilyevna/pseuds/yelenavasilyevna
Summary: The war starts like this.





	Death at My Heels

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [On the Lam](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14019987) by [MaplePaizley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaplePaizley/pseuds/MaplePaizley), [thewhiskerydragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewhiskerydragon/pseuds/thewhiskerydragon). 



> New thing! Didn't really like where YEL was going and this one was basically plotted out for me so...... Also big big props to @yelenavasilyevna and @klausdeservesahug on ig, they’re basically the reason I live and write not to mention they more or less wrote half of this bad boi hehe. I don't know how to use tenses so they're the reason this is readable lol. also i literally live and breathe validation so abuse the kudos and comments hehe

It starts like this.

A few dozen or so families of nobility make it out of a rapidly heating pot named Moscow in the early twentieth century by the skin of their teeth. They have bones in that country, they know a city that emerges from flame time and time again has to be lit every once in a while. Jewels get sewn into hems and petticoats, thick slabs of money panel the insides of luxurious fur coats, a few dozen or so cars slip away into the inky night, leaving behind kindling houses twinkling in the distance. Maybe they’ve done this before. It’s practically in their blood as much as their gold is.

These families were smart. They flung themselves across the globe to wherever obscenely wealthy people congregate and fill in their ranks. To Rome. To London. To Paris. Many to Paris. Russians love France almost as much as they hate the French. And as the century turns just enough to find themselves in a fashionable place to escape to; America. Lady Liberty greets them and their smuggled treasures perhaps more warmly than she does those who come with growling stomachs and open eyes. Equity tends to be a purchasable commodity.

And not all these families stay in New York. There are other places to be rich and be surrounded by the rich. They streak red lines to Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, settling there and finding their way however that may be. A couple of years later, they may well jet off to Los Angeles, places like that. But this isn’t about those families. This story stays in the home of immigrants. It stays in Manhattan.

The families that looked around where they landed and planted themselves there didn’t have the path of most that washed up on the shores of the Hudson. They were raised on opulence and addicted to it: worst drug on earth. And since there was no generational fortune to be passed down upon them here, they found their money through seedier ways. And stickier, and darker, and messier and until, almost without realizing it, the fallen nobility had become the mob.

Our little island was composed of three families: the Kuragins holed themselves up in the Upper East side, centered in on Harlem. Having a decent cut of what the clubs up there made, they were on the higher end of the families rivaled most harshly by the Bolkonsky clan, just across the park on the Upper West. Old Nikolai still had some pride after all, and if that meant loan-sharking the richest of the rich, so be it. They cruised large and charge, far above our dear little Rostov family. They had settled into the Lower Eastside, neighbor and friend to all that were new to this place, just like them. That, and the kickbacks from social works projects built up enough support and funds to make it more trouble than was worth to attack. Several other families spread out to other boroughs: Drubetsky to Queens, Karagin to Staten Island. Bezukhov had a good chunk of the Bronx but it’d been absorbed into the Kuragin hold with his marriage to the daughter. Vassily Kuragin was one hell of a bargainer, as it were.

And absolutely no one wanted Midtown.

They lived in this tense peace, the occasional skirmish breaking out on the edges of territories and the neutral bars each mobs’ militia of lackeys frequent. Each family tended their own, raising their children, molding their heirs, protecting or preparing those who weren’t. So long as no one wanted more than what was in his grasp, there wouldn’t be so much of an issue. Of course, for this story to unfold, that did not remain true. Rostov grew tired of being the underdog, of having so little and living so much in fear. He couldn’t take on either Kuragin or Bolkonsky without being blown off the map. So, you know what they say: if you can’t beat them, join them.

He had a plan and a humble proposition. The plan took form in his youngest daughter, freshly eighteen and very marriable, and a co-heading in the form of a new Bolkonsky-Rostov family. Ilya still had his morality, and neither of the Kuragin boys were worthy to even look at his daughter. The Bolkonsky heir was practically at the helm already, a respectable widower of thirty with a son the same age as his youngest. It was perfect. And it worked exactly how it was meant to be. But Kuragin simply couldn’t let that happen

The royal blooded knew how the revolutions ended, but always forgot how they began—the shifting of power.

* * *

 The early January snow pricked at Natasha’s nose and cheeks, her breath clouding up in steady streams as she hurried along the busy street. The time had gotten away from her and she was late to lunch with Mary again, but even all that couldn’t have stolen away the joy that reverberated in her soul with every heartbeat: she was getting _married_.

Call it cliche, but ever since she had known what marriage was, she had known that marriage was for her. She sought it in every magazine and catalog, in every secret excursion with Sonya into their mother’s closet, in every time she passed through her father’s smoky meeting rooms with his business partner in their family electricity company. They would’ve looked shady, but if Natalya ever was next to her and saw any inclination of superiority on her face, she would have scrubbed it out with soap and reminded her she was no better than them. She quickly learned not to question questionable people, in their neighborhood.

Naturally, marriage was out of the question until she was of a reasonable age. Her father hardly even let her _meet_ other boys until then, for gosh sake. Not since Sonya tattled about her and Boris. But Natasha would not be deterred from finding a husband, and finding her own: she was a lady of the twentieth century after all, and all the most modern women married who they liked when they wanted. Her father did not agree with such sentiments.

When she had just so much as heard that he was arranging someone for her (“Only if you like him!”), Natasha all but threw a fit. They weren’t exactly important family, with or without a successful electrical company, there was no reason to arrange a marriage, but he insisted regardless. Knowing better than to ever warn her, her family had sprung their first meeting on her at a party on the last of autumn’s legs. Her father had called her over, and she only assumed it was an introduction to another associate of utilities of some kind to fade away until she noticed the anxious glancing between her and the tall man he’d only just introduced. Several well-formulated insults to accrue the worst impression necessary melted away when she turned to address Andrei again. Slowly, a smile spread across his lips as if he was watching some distant mountains rather than a simple girl, and her heart fell out into his waiting palm. At that moment, it struck her that perhaps having an arranged marriage was not so bad.

They’d been whisked away to a more intimate space, though not private from all the eyes following them. The occasion of her marriage was important enough to garner this much attention, clearly. They simply talked there for however long it was, seconds, minutes, hours before he stood, pressed a gentlemanly kiss to her hand and walked away. She watched him go, shaking her father’s hand at the door before he disappeared. It had all transpired from there, taking the better part of two months to be officially betrothed. Natasha had been ready to marry him next week really, but there was all sorts of meeting the family to do and arrangements and meetings and whatever else marriages needed to be perfect like this one would be. She was sure of it.

They had just announced their engagement at a New Year’s party to ring in the sparkling new year of 1925, the newest year in their lives. To be married in the spring, under the cover of flowers and birds. The ring was beautiful, his grandmother’s, brought from Russia. Their stock holds got them out of there, after all. It was traditional and simple, just like the man she was going to marry. Perfect in every way. She twisted it about her finger as she walked along to lunch with Mary. She could live through this dreadful affair with her soon-to-be sister in law. She always did. But at what cost?

The sharp call of her name broke her from her thoughts, waking some instinct long forgotten since early schooling. Natasha whirled about, finally locating the source of it from a man leaning nonchalantly against a wall, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He looked vaguely familiar, but so did most people, but his eyes, rimmed thickly with something heavy and black stared into her with a tired intensity she felt she might remember. “Do I know you?”, asked she with a bit of a nervous titter hanging on the end of the question.

He didn’t answer, taking the last drag before throwing the used butt to the ground, crushing it under his heel. The general impression was rather threatening. He dug his hands into his pockets, still very unhurried even as she began to glance about for some semblance of help around her. He surprised her with a gruff, “You’re coming with me.” Natasha turned back to him, insulted and drew in a breath to tell him just how so. That was her mistake.

In a move so quick she didn’t entirely have time to process, the unnamed man grabbed her wrist and twisted it hard up behind her back, shoving her into the dark alley she hadn’t even comprehended beside him. With his free hand, a cold white cloth came up to cover her mouth and nose entirely, filling them with a thick and acrid sweet scent that she choked on. She struggled against his grip but he held fast, even as she pummeled his shins and the one side she could reach with her free hand. But her fight quickly weakened before all at once, she dropped in his arm, limp, unmoving.

* * *

 “You sure this is the right girl?”

“She responded to her name, Дубиина.”

“I’m just saying she doesn’t look like the photo.”

“So she got a haircut. Doesn’t make her a different person.”

“Leyla’s gonna kill you if you got the wrong person again, Fedya.”

“I _didn’t_ , Makarin. And it was your fault last time anyways. We’ll get Bezukhov down to identify her later if he’ll sober up for it. And Christ, you are going to get your tongue cut out if you keep calling her Leyla.”

“What, you get to just because you’re–”

“Yes. Now shut it. She’s waking up.”

This Fedya was right about that. Natasha’s eyes, dazed and glossy from whatever had been used to put her down, adjusted poorly to the dark hole she was in, the faces of the two men in the room shifting in and out of the light that filtered in through the slats in the ceiling. The shine never wavered, however, from the board of sharp utensils that glistened pristinely. A sinking feeling in her stomach accompanied the notion she would not be going home anytime soon. Home. How long had she been gone? Surely, Mary must have noticed when she didn’t show up to lunch, but perhaps she just thought she was flaking. Oh, this was a nightmare.

She lurched back as the other one, Makarin, tipped the chair she was strapped to onto its hind legs, resting the cold flat of his blade on her exposed throat. Natasha didn’t know where her jacket and scarf had gone, but it didn’t seem very important at the moment. In a slow, deliberate way of speaking, he murmured into her ear, “Why don’t you start telling us what you know, and we won’t start chopping off your extremities?”

Tears stung at her eyes as he straightened up, still holding her chair off the ground. She stammered out, “I- I don’t know why I’m here, my father runs an electrical company and he has some money, do you want–”. Her pathetic rant was cut short by the man dropping her chair flat on its four legs, her head snapping forwards upon impact.

Makarin raised his knife, pointing towards Fedya. “Didn’t I say this wasn’t the right girl? Her father’s a fucking technician, not a crime boss. We’re royally screwed.”

Fedya scoffed, snatching the knife from his associate. “Like hell he is. This is Ilya Rostov’s daughter, I don’t give a rat’s ass what she says he is.” He turned the blade onto her, reflecting light up onto his face, revealing himself as the same one who took her to begin with.

Before Natasha was certain that he would use it on her for some sort of information she did not have, a door swung open behind her, releasing a flood of warm light into the room. Both of her captors looked up, a frown stretching Fedya’s face down. “Anatole, we’re working.”

A mild-mannered voice replied, rather unstressed even under these circumstances. “Oh, I know. I just thought it might be useful for you to know she’s supposed to go upstairs.”

Considering reactions this statement created, she might’ve thought the disembodied voice had announced something much more despicable than her location. Fedya straightened, setting the butt of the knife down heavily on her shoulder that drew a gasp of pain from her he offhandedly shushed. Offended, she glared up at him as he dealt with this Anatole now. “You mean you didn’t think that was important to tell me this when you first sent me off?”

“Well, I didn’t send you off. Lena did, I’m just the messenger of her word.”

“Oh, bullshit, I’m not doing semantics right now.”

“Just cut her loose and bring her up.” There was a sound of footsteps and suddenly, another man was in front of her, though surprisingly not looking at her like a task but rather something valuable. He was startlingly pale and just as startlingly handsome, with eyes like stars and high, haughty cheekbones. He looked rather like he had hopped odd scene of a romance picture and not at all like he fraternized in dank torture basements. “You hadn’t done anything to her yet besides shake her up some, so no harm no foul.” As if suddenly realizing he could talk to her, Anatole smiled, a sleek charming thing. “How rude of me. I’ve forgotten my manners. Anatole Kuragin, a pleasure to meet you. Fyodor Dolokhov is currently cutting you out of your binds, and Ivan Makarin is attempting to look apologetic.” The rope around her wrists slid off and Natasha rubbed at the raw skin, attempting to start circulation up again. A moment later and those holding her ankles to the front legs of the chair fell off as well.

Anatole helped her off the chair, leading her out of the cold room into a shockingly pleasant hallway flowing with golden light, his minions trailing behind them, grumbling something unpleasant as they went. They went up several flights of stairs and through a maze of gleaming, identical hallways, though they got nicer as they continued on, then down more stairs and through more hallways, until it occurred to her they were throwing off her sense of direction in this place. Apparently, her savior caught this discovery and threw her a sympathetic look. “Apologies. Boss’s policy.”

They walked through several more rounds of this, either to make a point or this boss was really very serious about this policy because Natasha had lost her way far before she even knew what they were doing. Without warning, Anatole threw out an arm that she nearly ran into, to his pleasure. “This is where you’re intended. Play nice. She doesn’t take nicely to insubordination.”

Before Natasha could even begin to process what that was supposed to mean, he threw a heavy set door open, revealing a complex and well-furnished study, with a lone woman sitting at the desk of it, reading over documents of some kind. She looked up expectantly as if having been made to wait and annoyed by it. “Come in, Natalya. We haven’t got all day.”

Natasha looked over to Anatole who very unhelpfully only motioned her inside. Clearly, this was her only alternative to returning to the interrogation room, albeit this seeming like the upscale version of that. She stepped in, crossing the threshold to sit at the well-upholstered chair across from who she could only assume was the boss they spoke of. The door shut behind her, and Anatole appeared beside the woman, leaning on the top of her chair. She was beautiful in the same way he was handsome: so much it almost hurt, with finely carved features and flashing eyes. Siblings, clearly.

“You’re late,” said she, and before Natasha could get a word out, spoke again. “Not your fault, I know.” The woman gestured to a plate of food, sandwiches, and things to one side of the desk. “Eat. I heard you missed lunch.”

“No thank you,” said Natasha, which sparked some reaction in her that she didn’t entirely understand.

“Smart girl.” The woman nodded as she spoke, picking up a burning cigarette resting on the edge of an ashtray. “I imagine you have questions for me.” There was a pause as they both watched each other, assessing the other’s damage. “You’re allowed to ask them.”

“Where am I?”

“Above 96th street. Harlem.”

“What time is it?”

She consulted a clock on her desk. “Just after 5.”

“How do you know my name?”

“I know you.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Good.”

Natasha leaned forward, placing her hands on the edge of the desk. “Why am I here?”

The woman laughed. “Now you’re asking the right questions.” Resting her cigarette at her lips, she studied her for a moment, blowing out smoke lazily. “Alright. Give me a minute to explain.” They stewed in this silence while she presumably collected her thoughts on the subject. She then stood, passing off the cigarette to Anatole who set it down with a disdainful disgust. She sat atop the desk, leaning into Natasha’s direction, the impression that this was an intimate conversation between old friends heavy. “You aren’t the daughter of the owner of an electrical company. You’re the daughter of a mob boss.”

The room was quiet as the words settled over every surface of the room. Natasha’s head swam as she tried to fit that information in somewhere, anywhere that it could have possibly made sense, but it simply didn’t. This woman presented her with a reality that was not compatible with the one she lived it, it was something that just couldn’t be true for the sake of the order of the universe. But why else would she get snatched in public, threatened with knives? No rival company was so passionate to do that. In a shaky voice, she managed out a, “How?”

The woman shrugged. “I can’t tell you the specifics of _how_ your father decided to create a gang. He got here however many years ago, decided that he couldn’t live without money, got it however he could, and proceeded to hide it from you. That’s how it goes.”

She seemed very prepared for this conversation. Had they known that she didn’t have a clue what was happening about her and still decided to take her anyway? That was rotten of them. “I still don’t understand what I have to do with any of this. If I believe you and my father truly does run the mob, I never had any part in it. What do you want me for?”

“A mob. Your father runs a mob, not the mob.” Touchy subject, from the way the boss responded. “You’re our upper hand.”

“Hope we’re still invited to the wedding,” commented Anatole from his perch.

Natasha shot him a stressed look, turning to the woman for confirmation. “What does my wedding have to do with any of this?”

“Andrei is heir to the Bolkonsky gang.” Seeing the alarm ring on her face, the woman retired to her chair, retrieving her still burning cigarette from Anatole. “You get the gist of it. I have work to do. Fedya?”

She didn’t have to turn around to know her henchman was advancing to drag her back to the torture chamber. Natasha clutched at the arms of her chair, leaning forward desperately. “But you didn’t answer my questions,” she said, even as Fedya pulled her to her feet.

“Didn’t I?” She exhaled slowly, waving her away like a particularly bothersome gnat. “No need to worry, I don’t plan on hurting you. You’re just going to sit nice and pretty in a room for a while until we don’t need you, then you go home.”

Fedya was persistently pulling her out of the office but she dragged her heels best she could to try to garner any more information at all, to help her, to get out of here with. “You never even told me your name? What if I- what if I have more questions? He’s not going to answer them.”

The woman watched her for a moment, before to her own shock, nodding. She ground out the spent cigarette into the half-full ashtray on her desk, before meeting Natasha’s eye once more.

“You can call me Helénè. Goodbye now.” And the door swung shut.


End file.
